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'Green' fix urged for Ontario's job blues

Turning Ontario's vanishing blue-collar manufacturing jobs into stable, well-paying &quot;green-collar&quot; employment in the emerging green economy should be central to poverty-proofing the province, says a new report.

Julio Silva, 41, seen with wife Monica and daughter Beatriz, worked three jobs to support his family. Now in a union job as a janitor, he says, "All cleaners should have the same opportunities." (MICHAEL STUPARYK / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

By Laurie MonsebraatenSocial Justice Reporter

Mon., May 12, 2008

Turning Ontario's vanishing blue-collar manufacturing jobs into stable, well-paying "green-collar" employment in the emerging green economy should be central to poverty-proofing the province, says a new report.

Ontario has the second-largest manufacturing workforce on the continent after California, yet the province seriously lags behind American states in retooling shuttered factories for the green industries of the future, notes the report, entitled "Work isn't Working for Ontario Families."

"In the United States, cross-sectoral coalitions ... are working to create jobs and renew the manufacturing sector by focusing on green economic opportunities," says the report by Campaign 2000, the Toronto Labour Council and the Ontario branch of the Canadian Labour Congress.

Campaign 2000 is a national non-profit coalition of groups and individuals dedicated to ensuring Parliament lives up to its pledge to eliminate child poverty.

"Government has a leadership role to play providing policy frameworks, incentives and direct support for the development of new green manufacturing and services," the report says.

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As Ontario loses manufacturing jobs, too many Ontario workers are becoming trapped in bad jobs with lousy wages, few benefits and no security, says the report's author Ann Decter, head of Campaign 2000.

Turning those bad jobs into good jobs is key to lifting children out of poverty, maintaining social order and ensuring the province's long-term economic prosperity.

The 27-page report, to be released at Queen's Park today, calls on the McGuinty government to kick-start the transformation by updating provincial labour laws, removing barriers to unionization of low-wage workplaces, investing in public goods and services and turning Ontario into a manufacturing hub for new green industries.

"Ontario parents need access to a job that allows them to provide an adequate living standard for their children and offers enough financial security to weather the crises of everyday life and plan for the future," the report says.

"Within the broad range of its powers, the provincial government can do much to lead labour and the private sector into a change process to the benefit of low-income children whose parents are struggling to build a secure life," it adds.

Statistics show parents are working and jobs are available, says the report, noting that Ontario's unemployment rate was just 6.1 per cent in February. The problem is that stable, well-paying manufacturing jobs that helped build the province's middle class over the past 30 years are disappearing and being replaced by low-wage service sector, temporary and contract work.

Of Ontario's 345,000 poor kids, 41 per cent had a parent who was working full-time all year, the report says.

The report uses Statistics Canada's pre-tax, low-income cut-off as a measure of the minimum salary of a good job. For a family of four in a large city like Toronto a "good-job" salary was $40,259 in 2007. For that same family in a smaller community, it was $34,671.

The average worker who loses a manufacturing job in Ontario experiences a 25 per cent cut in income when he or she finds new work, the report says. For Toronto parent Phuong Le, 48, who lost her $44,000-a-year job assembling light switches in 2005, the drop was even more dramatic. Today she works part time at a big box retailer earning just $14,000 annually.

"I would like to work more hours but all they will give me is part time," says Le, who didn't want her real name used for fear of retribution from her employer.

For Le and her husband, both immigrants who have lived and worked in Toronto for 28 and 35 years, respectively, factory work allowed them to raise their son and daughter in a stable middle-class home. But today, as work dwindles at the auto-parts plant where her 51-year-old husband works, Le fears for the future.

"If my husband gets laid off, I don't know what we'll do," she says. "We are too old to retrain and too young to retire. Nobody wants us."

Instead of wringing our hands over the 205,000 manufacturing jobs Ontario lost between 2002 and 2007, the province should follow the example of many U.S. states that are wooing green jobs, said John Cartwright, head of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council.

The report welcomes the province's recent decision to fast-track the start-up of its Next Generation Jobs Fund with $1.5 billion for support to companies that produce green products or save energy. But a broader strategy that links government policy, private sector innovation, labour know-how and environmental science is needed to turn blue-collar jobs into "green-collar" employment, Cartwright says.

The province must also help improve wages and working conditions in temporary and non-standard employment, primarily in the growing service sector, the report says.

Regulating marginalized work and removing barriers to unionization, which helped turn manufacturing into good middle-class jobs in the 1950s and '60s, will help transform these jobs too, the report says.

Toronto father Julio Silva, 41, has first-hand knowledge of the benefits of unionization. When Silva moved here with his family from Brazil in 2005, the teacher and his psychologist wife could only get non-union office and condo-cleaning jobs that paid little more than minimum wage with no benefits.

For many years, Silva worked three separate jobs – a morning, evening and weekend shift, to support the couple's daughter, now 8.

But two years ago, Silva got a part-time job as a janitor for the Toronto District School Board and saw his hourly wage jump to $18, meaning he could spend weekends with his family.

He's hoping to get full-time work with the school board so that he can give up his office cleaning job to spend more time with his daughter during the day.

"The TDSB is a good union job that pays good wages and benefits," he says.

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